Mitchell Syrop’s lithographic and laser pigment prints and installations expose the human condition of being trapped within systems, be they interpersonal, societal, economic or political. Engaging with Syrop’s idiosyncratic use of language, text and found images means being told not to ‘quit your day job’ and reminds us of the irony of believing one is unique. Having studied under the original Conceptualists, including Huebler, Asher and Baldessari, Syrop, along with artists Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, engaged with commodification, mass marketing and the aesthetics of advertising. The clichés, or slogans of culture, present in Syrop’s work are inserted onto images of cells under a microscope or ‘perfect’, travel-advertising photographs of sandy beaches. Inviting multiple interpretations of his interchange between text and image, Syrop evokes a structuralist understanding of language as a system of arbitrary signs. The private, the public, love, grief, existentialism and subjectivity intertwine in the hands of the artist, whose work reveals human vanity and pride while remaining honest in its own complicity of recycling clichés.
Written by Goldsmiths CCA ...
